The NSA Has Changed the American Way of Life

When news broke regarding the NSA surveillance, President Obama quickly reassured us that checks and balances were in place and that the government had struck an appropriate balance between liberty and security. With news that the NSA broke the law 2,776 times in a 12-month period, it’s clear the intelligence industrial complex has betrayed America’s trust.

It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of information it is (phone records, Facebook or Google accounts), and it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re a journalist or not. We now know that our personal correspondence no longer has the privacy that we once assumed. In the past, it was conspiracy theorists who lacked peace of mind on these things. No longer. Perhaps we Americans should consider what we have forsaken in asking the government to make us more secure. When considering 4th Amendment protections, judges often ask if people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding such-and-such. It is now clear that a reasonable person will not expect very much privacy regarding personal information in the future.